App/Software

Amelia Taylor of Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences in Malawi will employ Large Language Models (LLMs), including ChatGPT and MedPalm, to develop a tool to streamline the collection, analysis, and use of COVID-19 data. Collecting accurate and comprehensive data during a pandemic is critical for response efforts but the process is labor-intensive. During COVID-19 surveillance, there were also limited training materials available to explain specialized concepts for data collection to the multidisciplinary teams.

Brenda Hendry of Boresha Live in Tanzania will integrate ChatGPT-4 into community radio to broadcast inclusive health messages across Tanzania to combat malaria. Tanzania is among the top ten countries with the highest malaria cases and deaths. Their control efforts are severely hampered by limited access to accurate health information among certain populations. Radio is very popular and reaches across rural and remote areas making it a powerful communication medium.

Scott Mahoney of The Health Foundation of South Africa will create an application that combines human expertise with AI technology to produce clinical recommendations from published medical evidence to be used as a decision-support tool for healthcare professionals in low- and middle-income countries. Currently, producing guidelines and support tools relies on manual reading and synthesis by individual clinicians or editorial teams, which is time consuming and can lead to biased coverage.

Yogesh Hooda of the Child Health Research Foundation in Bangladesh will use AI-based tools to teach low- and middle-income scientists to perform modeling and prediction studies in public health, which are dominated by researchers in the Global North. The codes generated during modeling studies are not often shared amongst researchers, making the methods difficult to learn. They found that ChatGPT could produce a code using a published model in just three weeks with only a beginner-level programmer and a biostatistician.

Nana Kofi Quakyi of the Aurum Institute in Ghana will develop an AI-powered decision support tool for antibiotic prescribers to improve appropriate antimicrobial usage and combat antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in Ghana. AMR is a major public health concern, with the highest mortality rates occurring in Africa. To address this, Ghana's National Action Plan for Antimicrobial Use and Resistance (2018) identified the need for support tools that provide personalized, adaptable, and context-sensitive recommendations.

Khoa Doan of VinUniversity in Vietnam together with Helen Meng, Viet Anh Nguyen, and colleagues from the Centre for Perceptual and Interactive Intelligence and The Chinese University of Hong Kong, both in Hong Kong; in collaboration with the Hanoi Obstetrics & Gynecology Hospital in Vietnam, will build a conversational AI chatbot to scale up gynecological healthcare support for women and LGBT+ communities in Vietnam.

Minh Do of Fulbright University Vietnam in Vietnam will create a chatbot "NướcGPT" (Nước means water in Vietnamese) that combines cutting-edge AI tools with a user-friendly interface in the local language to support the management of salinity intrusion in the Mekong Delta. The Mekong Delta, home to 21.5 million Vietnamese, is suffering from increased saltwater intrusion caused by multiple factors including climate change.

Henrique Araujo Lima of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil will develop a tool to systematically assess the accuracy and clarity of responses generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) to common questions on maternal health to increase their value in settings with limited healthcare access. To improve LLMs, it is essential to ensure the information they provide is both reliable and understandable, and for purposes such as health, LLMs will only be successful if both healthcare providers and users are confident about their benefits.

Mamadou Alpha Diallo of Cheikh Anta Diop University in Senegal will apply Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve decision-making, policy development, resource allocation and communication to help combat infectious diseases in Africa. They will use ChatGPT-4 to analyze and interpret epidemiological data, clinical records, and research literature to help predict outbreaks, identify priority areas for interventions, and evaluate the potential impacts of specific policies.

Maryam Mustafa of the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan will build a voice-enabled, mobile phone-based, conversational AI assistant, Awaaz-e-Sehat, for maternal healthcare workers in Pakistan to create and manage detailed electronic medical records. Pakistan has among the poorest pregnancy outcomes worldwide.